On Friday, The New York Times [free reg req'd] claimed that Sun was going to make its Solaris (Unix) operating system open source, following "the same free distribution strategy promoted by the developers of Linux." The technical term for this is "horse manure". However, E-Commerce Times probably got closest to the truth:
"The strange goings-on within Sun began during its quarterly update meeting in Shanghai on Wednesday. Sun executive vice president of software John Loiacono and newly appointed COO Jonathan Schwartz seemed to confirm the eagerly awaited announcement that Sun would open source its license for Solaris, its highly touted operating system.
After first denying it, the company later issued this statement: "At SunNetwork Shanghai, Jonathan Schwartz and John Loiacono discussed Sun's intentions to create a rich, open environment around its enterprise-class Solaris Operating System. At this time, Sun is in the process of soliciting customer feedback in refining various aspects of the project and is not discussing additional information, such as launch timing, licensing models or other details."
In other words, Sun is trying to find a way to get the open source community to support Solaris without actually making it open source, and especially not by making it open source like Linux, ie by releasing the code under the GPL. The most likely model is Java, which also is not open source.
There's nothing wrong with that as a strategy, of course. But Sun should already know that it is not going to get away with talkiing the talk if it doesn't also walk the walk.
